What’s new in NUKE & NUKEX 8?

NUKE 8 comes loaded with new features and improvements offering something for everyone. Whether you’re new to NUKE, an experienced user or pipeline developer, you’ll find a host of features, functionality and performance improvements to keep you happy.

Artist-friendly creative controls

The new text node in NUKE 8 allows artists to enter text directly into the viewer and edit or animate on a per-character basis.

NUKE 8’s dope sheet has been greatly enhanced and allows artists to see and move keys around in time with the results and each property of the node accurately displayed in context inside of the dope sheet.

Scopes are a new addition to NUKE 8 designed to give artists access to detailed levels of color data on images displayed in the viewer.

NUKE 8 comes pre-packed with new intelligent in-context help system to complement the existing node-specific in-application tooltips and includes all information currently found in NUKE’s PDF Getting Started Guide, User Guide, Reference Guide, video tutorials and example .nk scripts that open in your existing session.

The intuitive in-panel color wheel in NUKE 8 updates the existing color knobs with a new drop down panel making it easier and faster to select and change a color.

The new match grade node in NUKEX 8 offers automatically modifies the color histogram of an image to match a reference and makes grading simple and fast.

NUKE 8’s new full frame viewer mode ensures the full frame of the viewer is always processed when rendering, regardless of zoom level, and allows artists to playback and zoom in/out without the viewer recalculating any newly exposed scanlines.

Cutting-edge toolsets

NUKEX’s camera tracker has been completely remodeled to include the projection solver and a new Camera Calibrator. These updates let artists track and solve cameras from reference stills and can be used to assist with set or object modeling. NUKEX’s model builder has been updated to give artists the power to create UV’s within NUKEX useful when adding new 3D elements to existing clips.

New apply material filter options help to streamline 3D texture application on objects inside of NUKE. Artists can now choose to add textures to subsets of a model without needing to separate geometry into unique nodes.

New viewer capture functionality in NUKE 8 lets artists create a flipbook of the images from the viewer to quickly and easily check shots, for example the animation of a 3D scene, in realtime without having to do a full scanline render.

The new edit geo node in NUKE 8 allows artists to modify the vertices or faces of native NUKE geometry, or any geometry read in through a Read Geo node, including: Alembic, OBJ, FBX to give greater control over 3D elements.

The particle cache node in NUKEX speeds up rendering times by letting artist save a particle system’s simulation to file and then read it back in different sessions or on different machines at will, without the need to recalculate.

NUKE 8’s new wireframe shader node lets artists apply wireframes to a variety of different geometry types, giving them access to a range of additional effects and enhanced control over projection alignment.

NUKE 8 also includes new wireframe render option on the render mode knob of all 3D geometry nodes that gives added choice to artists when rendering objects or full scenes.

Enhanced customisation options

NUKE 8 gives developers of C++ plugins the ability to output planar data in a more flexible way thanks to new planar rendering framework.

NUKE 8 adds the new import NUKE function that allows developers to use NUKE as a module in any python interpreter.

The blink script node new to NUKE 8, lets developers write their own image processing operations inside of NUKE using the blink framework to get the best possible performance from a team’s hardware.

Which Features are new to NUKEX only?

Match grade node

Camera tracker update

Model builder UV creation

Apply material filter options

Patricle cache node

Speed and Performance Enhancements

OpenEXR 2.0 adds multi-part image read and write support to NUKE 8. With these capabilities artists can store their views and layers in separate subfiles to significantly increase speed when only working on a few layers at a time.

NUKE 8 also supports the recently released Alembic 1.5 which brings with it improvements in write, read, and especially multithreaded read performance.

New to NUKE with the latest release is the inclusion of NUKEX’s GPU acceleration, now no matter which NUKE you use you can harness the power of the GPU.